There have been other good… even very good… titles in the genre. But for me, these are the crown jewels that defined the genre.

StarCraft showed that very different factions could be brought together to form an almost zen-like rock/paper/scissors balance that required serious unit management skills to excel at.

Age of Kings brought that sort of balance to medieval armies, advancing at a slower pace. It reflected the real world aspect of cavalry vs. infantry vs. ranged, with siege engines in tow, forcing players to adopt a combined arms strategy to survive and win.

But before those two there was Total Annihilation, which brought chaos and mass slaughter.

TA wasn’t balance. The ARM ruled the early game with the Flash tank and the Peewee rush. Cavedog eventually had to give the CORE a unit whose only purpose was to kill Flash tanks and Peewee kbots.

It had a pretty bad, or at least not a very creative, single player campaign. Resources were simplistic, just power and metal. The UI was somewhat primitive compared to its contemporaries.

It was a resource hog that needed a couple of generations of CPU upgrades before it would run smoothly. The music was literally in the standard CD format, you could pop the game disk into your boom box and listed to the sound track.

And yet it was wonderful, a synthesis of a number of ideas put together in just such a way as to make a great game. Probably one of the greatest things the game did was make terrain matter in new and interesting way. Maps were 3D and heights could give you range in shooting or something to hide behind when fire was incoming. And then there was the whole modability aspect of the game.

Probably the greatest testament to TA is the fact that, while Cavedog Entertainment has been dead and gone for nearly a decade and a half, Total Annihilation still has a pretty strong and dedicated community still supporting it. You can still buy a copy over at GoG.com, and it runs great on today’s machines.

The Atari logo is a recent addition

Its main problem is that it was designed when multiplayer meant friends on a LAN, so being able to play over the internet requires effort. You need some network know-how or something like Game Ranger to help you out. So the idea of bringing the game into the 21st century is a compelling one.

As others have noted, its regularity… and the fact that we get a Holiday sale in December… has taken some of the edge off of the whole thing. Seeing a whole pile of games marked down was a huge deal the first couple of times we saw it. Now, however, we have come to expect it.

Oh look, games on sale… yawn…

Such sales have changed my behavior some. If there is a game I have to have right away, I still buy it right there and then… unless the sale is around the corner. Steam screwed me on that last year. I bought the Brave New World expansion for Civilization V the day it launched, despite the summer sale coming up. And then two days later the Summer Sale launched and the expansion was marked down, a gaffe that even Steam realized might have been a discount too soon.

Steam tries to make up

So maybe I won’t pre-order anything that will launch close to the sales zones any more, but otherwise my behavior on must-haves has not changed.

But for things I am not sure about, games that are not “must have” but merely nice to have… the Steam sales process has changed my behavior quite a bit. My wish list is now filled with things that I “sorta” want, if the price is right, and I am in a good mood. The impulse buy aspect of Steam sales has been replaced by watching my wish list. I look at what is on sale that day, then look at my wish list, ponder if anything is “must have” at their current price, and then move on, generally without buying anything.

This year I did end up buying a couple of games. One was for the strategy group “next game” plan that I wrote about last week, and which makes a good example of how Steam has influenced me.

While we had a list of potential games, Total War: Rome II was the primary contender, backed by Loghound. (I had other suggestions, but I wasn’t sold on any of them.) A not-too-old release, it still has a list price of $59.99, the current benchmark price for AAA games from major studios. As the summer sale was already in progress, it was marked down to half off. $29.98 wasn’t a bad price. There is a whole lot of game there.

But Steam has taught me to always wait until the REAL DEAL has been offered. So while Rome II was the prime candidate, nobody moved to purchase it until Friday, because it wasn’t until Friday that the REAL DEAL kicked in and the price dropped to $20.37. At that price it was an easy purchase and all of us picked up a copy. So that is the tentative next game for the group, once we finish up our Civ V game (at some point in August by my guess) and if it turns out to be suitable. A quick look shows a battle style that gives you a budget to buy units in advance, so I suspect this could mean long lead times before we actually play. But the single player campaign looks to be worth the investment, so even if we don’t play it much, it was probably worth the money with the deep discount.

So there it is. Our next game has been chosen.

I did have two impulse purchases, one of which was Europa Universalis IV, as it had been marked down to $9.99. It has been on my wish list since it launched, so I am not sure if it is really an “impulse” buy, but I grabbed it. It is one of those games… like its predecessors… that I really want to like, but which is so complicated and so deep that I can never get into it and actually play. I spend most of my time trying to figure out how to do simple things, which quickly becomes frustrating. I have no reason to suspect that this will be any different.

The other was Ticket to Ride, which I already own on the iPad. I should have just stuck with that. The iPad version is the game as it should be played and as it should look and perform. The Windows version is slow, graphically inferior, and prone to buffering mouse clicks as you wait for it to catch up, leading to many a mis-played moment. I regret this purchase and I could not recommend this on Steam even at its very low sale price.

And, in a sale related matter that isn’t really about Valve or Steam, I was just a tiny bit annoyed to see Planetary Annihilation early access up on the list of things on sale… or even available at all. I backed their kickstarter, but not at a level high enough to get early access yet. I get a finished copy and that is all, but I actually paid more for that than the early access sale, which also gets you a full copy. And Uber Entertainment, the studio behind the title, hasn’t been the best about communication when it comes to actual progress towards release, they are a year late at this point, and they are out there hawking early access at retail. I realize early access is basically a retail pre-order, but it still makes me think, “Dude, remember me? I gave you money nearly two years ago?” Just the nature of Kickstarter projects I guess.

And then there was the contest.

In order to spice things up… and get people to spend more money… Valve put everybody on teams and set us against each other for the possibility of getting something for nothing… assuming you didn’t buy anything for this gimmick. Clockwork over at Out of Beta covers the whole thing better than I, I just want to grouse about the level of exclusion.

Summer Adventure Gimmick

Anybody who wanted to participate got dropped onto one of the five color teams. However, to actually do anything to help your team, you had to be level 10, at least as far as I could tell. So despite years of Steam usage and owning over 100 games, I wasn’t able to play because I was only level 7.

Level as of July 1, 2014

While that was up from where I stood last year, it still wasn’t enough.

The problem is… well one of the problems I suppose… is that I purchased most of my library before they got into the whole levels thing. And one of the prime ways you earn points to level up is based on how much money you spend, so most of my purchases didn’t count. The other problem is that I am not inclined to spend money just to level myself up on Steam. But that probably excluded me from the Summer Adventure thing anyway, as Clockwork pegs the whole thing as a pay to win affair.

And, on the annoying front, one of the ways I could have earned a few badges and points was by voting on the content of upcoming sales. Only you must be level 8 to earn anything by voting, so once again Steam failed to engage me by imposing what looks to be an arbitrary level limit on rewards. Bleh.

So, the score for the event.

Purchases at the lowest possible price as Steam has trained us: 1

Impulse purchases: 2

Engagement in sale related events: 0

Games on Steam I haven’t even played yet: too many

Maybe I will be the “right” level for whatever event Steam has planned by the time the Holiday Sale comes around.

When there is a Kickstarter going around something that gets you excited, it can seem like a great way for supports to get involved in a way that helps the development process.

And then there is the reality.

There was an article a couple months back (that I wish I could find) which reported the results of a study of Kickstarter projects and found that not only do most projects not get funded (which one would expect given the quality of a lot of the pitches), but that a large percentage of those that do fund subsequently fail to deliver anything (call it “take the money and run”), fail to get even close to their projected timeline (everything takes longer than you think), or deliver something that does not match what was promised in the initial pitch.

Now some of projects in the study seemed to be stuck in a category without considering mitigating factors. The Steve Jackson Games O.G.R.E. Designer’s Edition project has been delayed because they asked for $20,000 and ended up with nearly a million, so they actually expanded the scope of the project so that the end result will be even better that they had initially planned. But that has pushed out the timeline, so it appears on the “failure due to missed dates” list despite keeping backers fully appraised of the project status with regular updates.

(And I cannot emphasize how important updates are for such projects.)

In my own case, of the four projects I supported that actually made their funding goal (out of eight total) two appear to be stuck in the failed project timeline dimension.

Now, in one case, I know what is going on. The Jason Scott documentary three pack, which I first mentioned way back in September of 2011, has been delayed because of his Internet Archive work and because he got paid to do another documentary ahead of the ones funded on Kickstarter. I cannot say that the latter makes me very happy, but the documentary is being made available for free, so if you squint your eyes and look at things with your head turned sideways, it seems like maybe we’re getting a fourth documentary as part of the deal. Plus the other three are under way and I consider them getting made to be more important than me getting my copies in a timely manner.

On the flip side, there is a book I helped fund that has gone to the editors and hasn’t been heard from since. Such is life.

And then there is Planetary Annihilation, which I pitched in on because they invoked the name of Total Annihilation, one of two RTS games I still drag out and play to this day. (The other is Age of Empires: The Age of Kings, which I wish would get a screen resolution update and appear on Steam or GOG.com.) But this project has no real set timeline and, frankly, I have been burned before by people invoking the TA lineage. Supreme Commander was not at all satisfying to me, and so I stand ready to be disappointed again.

But amidst all of this “someday” level of hope, the fourth Kickstarter on my list delivered. The new content for Defense Grid: The Awakening arrived last week. As a supporter I already had my key and had access to pre-release versions of the new content, though I did not spend much time with them. I wanted to experience them as finished product.

The product is now finished.

It showed up a little late. The target was initially December. But progress updates were frequent and if you entered the Steam key you got as a supporter, you could see the new levels evolving from raw layouts to fully formed encounters. And once it was done, Steam updated you to the final version.

So I now have what I really wanted; more levels for my favorite tower defense game.

Now if Hidden Path can just get funding for their Defense Grid 2 project. They did not reach that level of funding as part of their Kickstarter and so must seek the money via more traditional channels.